LASU VC, others beneficiaries of dubious promotions, appointments –ASUU official

Dr Tony Dansu

The National Executive Council of the Academic Staff Union of Universities recently imposed sanctions on lecturers of the Lagos State University, Ojo, and declared the Vice-Chancellor, Prof. Olanrewaju Fagbohun, an enemy of the union. In this interview, the embattled Secretary of ASUU, LASU chapter, Dr Tony Dansu, tells SAMSON FOLARIN the implication of the sanctions

There has been a series of conflicts between ASUU LASU and the management. What in your view was the genesis of these?

The whole thing started with the last vice-chancellor who was draconian in the administration of the university. We saw a lot of impunity, maladministration and high-handedness. He had three major damaging policies that time.

First was the school fees, which were increased from N25,000 to N250,000 for regular courses and N350,000 for those at the college of medicine. For some of us who finished from LASU and paid less than N500 as school fees, we could not stomach that sudden change, which we felt would deny the children of the downtrodden quality education and make many lose their jobs.

The second was the issue of no vacancy, no promotion, meaning that if you are qualified for promotion by virtue of your work and maturity, you will not be given the promotion if there is no vacancy in your department. This means promotion will only be given to those in their good book.

The third was the policy of rationalisation, whereby certain courses in the university were thought not to be viable and profitable. And we thought that education is a social service that government must provide. But they said some courses in the faculties of education, arts, management science should be scrapped and only courses like medicine, law, management, engineering, should be left. We fought the three policies until they were reversed.

When the new VC came in, we saw a professor of law and thought he would run the university without any bias. Unfortunately, in less than three months, we saw him running the university with the same trend he met on the ground. As a union, we had the duty to caution him.  We started doing this unofficially so that it does not appear we wanted to pull down his administration.

What exactly was he doing wrong?

First, we saw him appointing people who were not qualified into positions of authority. The law of the university says that professors are the chairmen of departments; they are the heads of departments. But where there is no professor, you appoint the next most senior person. If an associate professor is not available, you appoint a senior lecturer. In other words, you follow the order of seniority.

But we had a situation where a vice-chancellor will appoint a student as an HOD above his lecturers in the department. By student I mean someone who does not have a PhD, but is running his programme in that department; you know that person is a student. So, imagine that person being appointed as an HOD above his teachers. We said no, this cannot occur in a university.

One of such in the Faculty of Engineering was appointed as an HOD by the VC above his seniors in the department. There are other situations where because you have personal hatred against the department, you won’t see anybody to appoint as HOD and then you will go and borrow somebody from another department to head them.

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Borrow HOD from another department?

Yes. For example, in the Faculty of Management Science, we have the Department of Insurance. In that department, a professor was appointed from the Department of Accounting to become the HOD of Insurance, where we have a senior lecturer that could take up that responsibility.

In the Department of Philosophy where the assistant secretary of the union was, we had PhD holders in that department. But the VC did not find anybody to appoint as HOD; he went to another department to pick a professor to be the HOD of Philosophy. The union said ‘you can’t run the school like this.’

When we saw all of these happenings, we thought we should go official and we started doing documentation and writing him officially. Immediately he saw that, he and his team probably thought we could stand in their way and they decided to start dealing with us.

First, the chairman and the vice-chairman of the union were dismissed on trump-up charges. That case is in court now and I won’t go into details.

When that happened, my assistant secretary and I became the spokesperson for the union. After that dismissal, he told the media that he was only trying to clear the rot in the system, whereas he was just victimising people.

At that point, we started bringing out the real rots in the system and we brought up his own regarding his professorship.

What was the real issue with the VC’s professorship?

So many things are not known to the people. If not that we found ourselves in positions of leadership, we might as well not know anything. What we thought originally was that Professor Fagbohun got his professorship from UNILAG (University of Lagos). The understanding everybody had then was that he applied for the vice-chancellor position of LASU based on the professorship he got from UNILAG.

But it was when he became the VC that we got to know that he claimed to have his professorship from LASU, where he had resigned since August 2011. We have documents to back this.

Are you sure he resigned?

Yes. He withdrew his service and it was approved by the university since 2011. When all these issues started, we discovered that the LASU administration during the time of the former VC played the prank by promoting him even when he was not in the system. He left in 2011 and they promoted him as a professor in 2014.

But what we found curious and questioned was the backdating of that promotion by the then registrar. We asked the council to investigate it. We know that the promotion was illegal, but the promotion was pronounced to be effective from May 2014. How come it was backdated to October 2008?

The belief is that it was that backdating that made him to apply for the vice-chancellorship in 2015. If the professorship was 2014, you cannot be qualified for the ‘several years’ that was required in the advertorial for the position of the university’s VC; 2014 to 2015 cannot be several years.

That was what we questioned. But the governing council decided to query how we got his letter of promotion, saying it is a classified document.

So, this was the reason you and your assistant were dismissed?

Yes. They said we attached confidential documents to our petition. We also attached the bulletin that they distributed indicating the effective date of the professorship.

They put us through a disciplinary panel. We got an injunction from the court to stop the panel. The court said we were covered by the Freedom of Information Act, but the panel said we must leave the system because they saw us as thorns in their flesh not to perpetrate their evils and frauds. We are now in court on that, so I don’t want to go further.

There is a litany of fraud in that system. If you see everything shining in LASU, it is like having a vehicle painted in a beautiful colour, but with a bad engine.

Are you saying the university never investigated this VC case?

It was covered up. You will not see anywhere where the governing council addressed the issue. I can tell you categorically that within two years, we wrote 33 letters to the governing council and not one was acknowledged. They did not respond to one.

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ASUU NEC recently imposed heavy sanctions on LASU lecturers.  What are the implications of these resolutions?

The implications are many. First, lecturers from other public universities in Nigeria are not expected to relate with LASU for any research collaboration.

Second, LASU lecturers are not to be accepted for sabbatical leave, contracts and exchange programmes in public universities, and lecturers from other universities are not to seek for such in LASU.

Third, LASU lecturers are not to serve as external examiners for programmes in other universities, and colleagues from other universities are not to serve in the same capacity to LASU

Also, PhD candidates who are due for viva voce to be pronounced Doctor of Philosophy shall not get examiners from public universities, and LASU senior academics too will not be invited for such functions in other public universities.

Besides, no academic conference organised to hold in LASU shall be attended by colleagues from other universities, and LASU lecturers shall be denied participation in conferences in other public universities. It’s going to negatively impact on both staff and students, and by extension, the university. This is very unfortunate.

Do you really think this will work?

Why not? It is always the ‘ruling class’ in the system that tries to manipulate the people. What happened in UNILORIN some years ago is what is playing out in LASU now. I know that loyal members of ASUU, who are many across the country, will implement the decisions. You could have some people that will try to default, but I am confident it will be effective.

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